Arctic Freezer i32 Plus cooler offers peace and quiet

Fancy motherboards that allow for custom PWM fan curves based on CPU, motherboard, and graphics card temperatures are wonderful. For example, I'm typing this story with only the sound of the fan inside my power supply and the clacking of my mechanical keyboard tickling my tympanic membranes. Unfortunately, not all motherboards have these features—gasp—even in 2017. Arctic Cooling now offers its Freezer i32 Plus CPU cooler to grant the gift of silence to owners of mobos without fine-grained PWM controls. The Freezer i32 Plus is a tower-style heatsink with four heat-pipes and two 120-mm fans in a push-pull configuration. The cooler's party trick is the fans' ability to shut off completely when their PWM duty cycle is under 40%.

Arctic says the Freezer i32 Plus is based on the design of its Freezer i30, with small improvements to improve performance and reduce noise. One of the changes is a move away from a shrouded single fan to a pair of fans. The positions of the copper heat pipes within the aluminum fin array have also changed, and the tower's thin profile should keep it clear of memory modules.

The included pair of the Arctic F12 120-mm fans remap 1-39% duty cycles to zero so that they don't spin at all. Although there's no official word, we presume that the control circuit also returns a false fan speed signal to the motherboard in order to avoid alerts from BIOSes expecting to see a fan spin in response to PWM signals. The company says users performing office tasks, browsing the web, or watching video might not ever hear the fan spin up during these activities.

The Freezer i32 Plus is intended for Intel CPUs with 80-mm square patterns only. This means that support is limited to Intel processors on LGA 115x, LGA 2011 and LGA 2011v3 sockets. Arctic says its screw-mount back plate has a "fool-proof" install method and that it should let users move their PCs around without risk of breakage.

Arctic's website shows a price of $50 for the Freezer i32 Plus. The company's existing Freezer i32 cooler with a single fan sells for about $30 at our favorite online retailers.